The Bitcoin Integrated With M-Pesa Goes Live In Kenya With Kipochi Ltd

Kipochi, (Swahili for wallet) a new firm based in Kenya and founded by Pelle Braendgaard from Nicaragua is set to be the first Bitcoin wallet service designed for the whole world.

According to Pelle six days ago, Kipochi Ltd launched its groundbreaking solution that allows people to send or receive BitCoin and convert it to and from an M-Pesa balance.

The service will enable Kenyans to receive money transfers from the diaspora in an easier, faster and cheaper way, compared to using banks and money transferring services such as Western Union and MoneyGram.

Pelle says Kipochi is a light weight easy to use BitCoin Wallet that allows users to receive and send BitCoin all over the world. Even for people using simple low cost feature phones.

He adds that users in remote Kenya will not need to travel to any bank as Kipochi, M-Pesa and BitCoin can together assist the developing countries in creating faster remittances and growth on GDP, M-Pesa currently accounts for 31% of Kenya’s GDP

Kipochi works on all mobile phones, having SMS, USSD and HTML5 frontends, as well as a desktop computers.

Kipochi is privately owned and has offices in amongst other places Kenya and Nicaragua.

If you need some light, Ke 1 MilliBit = KSh6.89. Kipochi says they use the first independent non governmental currency Bitcoin as the base for all its transactions to allow users buy Bitcoin using M-Pesa.

The service also promises that there will be no more need for expensive bank wires abroad as users can receive funds from abroad easily or one’s friends and family can finally send money to them quickly and free with very low transaction fees.”Kipochi will never charge you anything to send Bitcoin to your friends or family. The Bitcoin network itself imposes very small transaction fees of currently KSh3.44,” he said.

Users can receive Bitcoin using their phone number making it easy to use and has no confusing jargon like other bitcoin networks.

Users can also send funds abroad and between operators and the greatest of them all is Kipochi allows one to send money from M-Pesa to Airtel to Orange to Yu and to almost all mobile operators in the world.

Users can also purchase things abroad, buy web hosting, gift cards and many other things in the US, Europe and elsewhere and for those not using their phones, it is also available on the web